Urban Outfitters And The Politics Of Cool

There are 26 comments on the
National Public Radio
story from Jul 15, 2012, titled Urban Outfitters And The Politics Of Cool.
In it, National Public Radio reports that:

It's not difficult to find an Urban Outfitters store these days, but it's understandable that if you don't have a 16-year-old daughter, a penchant for owl-shaped drawer pulls or a belief that you look great in scarves, you may never set foot in one.

As Mitt Romney closes the gap, it is 1980 all over again for the man in the Oval Office.

By Tim Stanley25 May 2012

What changed? For a start, voters are getting gloomier about the economy. Joblessness remains high and debt is out of control. According to one poll released this week, only 33 per cent of Americans expect the economy to improve in the coming months and only 43 per cent approve of the way that the president has handled it. Voters think Obama has made the debt situation and health care worse. The man who conducted the poll  Democrat Peter Hart  concluded that Obamas chances for re-election are no better than 50-50.

The president has tried to distract from Americas economic misery by playing up the so-called culture war. Earlier in the year he decided that he would force Catholic employers to provide contraception to their employees through their insurance plans, and he followed that swipe at social traditionalism by endorsing gay marriage. This embrace of Sixties liberalism has backfired. While contraception and gay marriage often receive popular support in national polls, Americans are far more conservative in the voting booth. Thirty-two states have voted on gay marriage and all 32 have voted to outlaw it  even liberal California. Nor has the culture war rallied his partys base. In presidential primaries held on Tuesday, 39 per cent of Arkansas Democrats and 42 per cent of Kentuckian Democrats rejected Obamas re-nomination. In West Virginia, 41 per cent of the states Democrats voted for an imprisoned criminal rather than the president.

The result is that pollsters find Obama and Romney edging towards one another. Rasmussen puts Obama only one point ahead; Gallup calls it a tie. With Romney doing better than the president in key swing states North Carolina and Florida, Gallup has publicly stated that Obama now has a higher chance of losing rather than winning.Related Articles

But it isnt just Obamas flaws that are making this race interesting. Mitt Romney might not be the most charismatic candidate, but thats a hidden strength in an election thats all about competence and getting back to the basics of what once made America work so well. This week, the pro-Obama journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote that with his wealth, good looks and apple-pie conservatism, Romney is like a focus-group tested model president from 1965. Sullivan obviously doesnt realise how popular the TV show Mad Men is. Who wouldnt warm to a candidate that represents an age marked by low unemployment, stable families and a laissez-faire attitude towards drinking at work?

In fact, the grey Mr Romney is repeating the same formula that won him the governorship of Massachusetts, an ordinarily Democrat state, in 2002. He pulled that off by motivating large numbers of Republicans to vote for him, breaking into the working-class vote and keeping turnout among Democrats fairly low.

In 1980, Democratic president Jimmy Carter faced an uphill struggle for re-election. Yet, despite an index of inflation and unemployment far higher than Obamas, he was actually doing slightly better in the polls. In March of that year, Carter led his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, by around 25 per cent. By May, Gallup gave him a lead of 49 to 41 per cent  higher than Obamas today. Carters advantage evaporated in the months that followed, but he regained ground in October and by the last week he was running even.

Barack Obama promised a new era of post-partisanship. In office, he's played racial politics and further split the country along class and party lines.

By PATRICK H. CADDELL DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN

During the election campaign, Barack Obama sought to appeal to the best instincts of the electorate, to a post-partisan sentiment that he said would reinvigorate our democracy. He ran on a platform of reconciliationof getting beyond "old labels" of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values.

President Obama's Inaugural was a hopeful day, with an estimated 1.8 million people on the National Mall celebrating the election of America's first African-American president. The level of enthusiasm, the anticipation and the promise of something better could not have been more palpable.

And yet, it has not been realized. Not at all.

Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.

Mr. Shultz dwells at length on the national debt, and on the Fed's role in enabling it:

"It's startling that in the last year, three-quarters of the debt that's been issued has been bought by the Fed and the balance has been bought by other countries, so U.S. citizens and institutions are not on net buying U.S. debt.... The Fed doesn't have an unlimited capacity because when it buys the debt what it's doing is monetizing the debt. Sooner or later that has got to get out into the economy. Can't be held forever. And when it does in that kind of volumeas Milton Friedman taught us, inflation is a monetary phenomenonit's gonna be hard to control."

"Let's talk about football.... You want to know the rules and have an impartial referee, but you also want to make sure somebody isn't going to come along and change the rules in the middle of the game.

... Now it's as though we have all these people who have money on the sidelines and we say 'Come on and play the game,' and they say 'Well what are the rules?' and we say 'We'll tell you later.'

And what about the referee? Well, we're still struggling for who that's gonna be.... That's not an environment designed to get people to play."

He also cites Washington's "habit of passing bills that are thousands of pages long and you know most legislators haven't even read what they're voting for."

That would be ObamaCare, of course. "I fear that the approach to controlling costs in the health-care business is moving more and more to a wage-and-price-control approach. And one thing you know from experience is when you control the price of something, you end up getting less of it. So if you control the price of health-care providers, you will have fewer of them and that's gonna wind up as a crisis. The most vivid expression of that ... was Jimmy Carter's gas lines."

Experience. Examples. Evidence. Shultz themes.

As we turn to foreign policy, the national debt again looms large: "Now remember something. Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the Treasury, and a very good one, redeemed all of the Revolutionary War debt at par value, and he said the 'full faith and credit' of the United States must be inviolate, among other reasons because it will be necessary in a crisis to be able to borrow. And we saw ourselves through the Civil War because we were able to borrow. We saw ourselves able to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese because we were able to borrow. We've got ourselves now to the point where if we suddenly had to finance another very big event of some kind, it would be hard to do it. We are exhausting our borrowing capacity."

Mr. Shultz is not an alarmist about the rising power of China. He believes Chinese leaders understand their interest in having good relations with the United States. He is withering in his critique of those who would blame cheap Chinese labor or a cheap Chinese currency for U.S. economic problems:

"We are consuming more than we produce and we've done that a while and we're complaining about the fact that we have an imbalance of trade with China. But if you consume more than you produce, you have to import. It's just arithmetic. And if you spend more than you earn, you have to borrow. It's just arithmetic."

We need to gear our retirement system in such a way that people keep working longer."

He suggests ending Social Security taxes for people who have paid in for 40 years. The way to meet our demographic challenge is to keep people in the labor force longer, Mr. Shultz says, and not fall for European notions that there is some fixed amount of work to be divided up. "The trick is to keep expanding the pie."

We end on some wistful and optimistic notes. "There's no lack of creativity in the United States." Silicon Valley, he says, "is a giant Stanford spinoff." He waxes lyrical for a moment about Steve Jobs. "My wife tells a story," he says about a party with Jobs's wife. "[My wife] says well 'Where's Steve?'" "Steve is thinking. He's decided to take six months off and think" is the response. "He was a creative genius," adds Mr. Shultz with admiration.

Shultz conservatism is not dour, budget-balancing conservatism. Nor was Reagan's. It is a belief in the human spirit.

And, of course, in economic policies based on evidence. As the interview closes, I am treated to a songnot a note out of placethat was sung by the secretary on Milton Friedman's 90th birthday:

"A fact without a theory is like a ship without a sail. Is like a boat without a rudder. Is like a kite without a tail. A fact without a theory is as sad as sad can be. But if there's one thing worse in this universe, it's a theory ... without a fact."

The Space Coast in FL lost over 26,000 jobs and FL's democrat Senator, Bill Nelson, did nothing to halt the loss of jobs on FL's Treasure Coast. Nelson has been in office in FL for over 40 years and no one can say what the hell he has done for FL. NUTHIN!

An example of refusing to discuss the ECONOMY!It's jobs, jobs, jobs!The biggest outsourcer of jobs is President Obama.Think about US space program. We're paying foreign entities to send OUR astronauts into space.In this case, it's Russia:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russiano...The Space Coast in FL lost over 26,000 jobs and FL's democrat Senator, Bill Nelson, did nothing to halt the loss of jobs on FL's Treasure Coast. Nelson has been in office in FL for over 40 years and no one can say what the hell he has done for FL. NUTHIN!And the guy wants to be re-elected?!?!Puhleeze!Obama OUTSOURCED the Space Program, lost jobs for FL residents.MITT!

An example of refusing to discuss the ECONOMY!It's jobs, jobs, jobs!The biggest outsourcer of jobs is President Obama.Think about US space program. We're paying foreign entities to send OUR astronauts into space.In this case, it's Russia:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russiano...The Space Coast in FL lost over 26,000 jobs and FL's democrat Senator, Bill Nelson, did nothing to halt the loss of jobs on FL's Treasure Coast. Nelson has been in office in FL for over 40 years and no one can say what the hell he has done for FL. NUTHIN!And the guy wants to be re-elected?!?!Puhleeze!Obama OUTSOURCED the Space Program, lost jobs for FL residents.MITT!

"Where are the jobs?" must be the new "Where is your birth certificate?"

We had another month of job growth and 92% of the workforce is employed. If you want a job, GET OFF YOUR LAZY ASS AND GET ONE, like every other hard working American. Man up and stop asking the government for a handout.

But oh well...every time you present the RINO loons the birth certificate they will always be in denial.

<quoted text>"Where are the jobs?" must be the new "Where is your birth certificate?"We had another month of job growth and 92% of the workforce is employed. If you want a job, GET OFF YOUR LAZY ASS AND GET ONE, like every other hard working American. Man up and stop asking the government for a handout.But oh well...every time you present the RINO loons the birth certificate they will always be in denial.

Hannity Focus Group Thinks Obama Will Be Re-ElectedPoor Sean Hannity! Despite having stacked his focus group with almost all conservatives, when he asked whether or not President Obama will be re-elected, most of them voted yes.Scammity thought he could rig a panel.hahahahahahaharugby '12: America 2nd

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